[Revised entry by E. Jennifer Ashworth on October 9, 2015.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
A singular term, such as a proper name or a demonstrative pronoun, is a term that signifies exactly one individual thing. The existence of singular terms raises various questions about how they function within a language. Do proper names have a sense as well as a referent? If they do have a sense, what is it, and how do they acquire it? How is this sense transmitted from one speaker to another? Is a demonstrative pronoun purely referential? If one believes in a language of thought,...